Turn Features Into Benefits For Maximum Marketing Appeal

When it comes to designing poster printing and other marketing materials, highlighting benefits always generate more interest and bring in more customers than highlighting features. If you are a business owner creating your own marketing materials, you might have a hard time of creating purely benefit-oriented marketing materials.

The difference between a feature and a benefit

A lot of people, who do their own marketing materials instead of using an agency make this common mistake, so do not feel bad if you have made this mistake in the past. Some copywriters can even get features and benefits confused. The difference between them is that features talk about facts (remember the two Fs to help you differentiate) and benefits relate more to customer experiences, specifically good customer experiences.

For example, if you have a chiropractic office, your features might include the following:

Over 15 years of experience
Excellent customer service
Latest technology

Translating features into benefits

Now, let us translate these features into benefits. First of all, you need to put yourself in the mind of your ideal customer. Figure out why these features matter to the customer. How do these features make customers lives better? What emotions do these features make them feel? Taking all of these questions in mind, we can translate the features above into the benefits below:

You can trust me with your back and health
You would not have to wait for your appointment and your questions will be answered
You will get the utmost care because our technology catches conditions older technology cannot do.

Now compare these two lists. What makes the benefits sound so much better than the features? Mainly it is because features do not appeal to emotions and other chiropractors can make the same claims as your features. Your features do not differentiate you from your competitors.

The benefits list sounds a lot better because they do appeal to emotions and customers well-being. People make purchasing decisions based more on emotion than logic, so appealing to emotions is more effective in getting customers to choose you over your competition. Also, people like to think that everything is about them. The benefits concentrate the marketing message on the customers, right where they like the attention to be.

One caveat

When you are creating your marketing materials, be sure to only focus on a few benefits at a time. If you throw out six or seven benefits for the customer to consider, the customer will get confused and overwhelmed by all the information. Do not give the consumer more than he needs to know. A short and simple message that communicates just a few benefits is much clearer than a long message that is packed with so many benefits the consumer forgets what he was reading about!